Trump Sends Pharma Stocks Down with New Tweet on Drug Prices

What are the manufacturing costs for software?

High profit margins are not a bad thing, as long as people can still afford them. What we need is the proper type of regulations, I agree we need to streamline the fda process, but that alone is not going to solve things.

There are a few options I've heard, such as a special Patent for drugs which after ten years becomes a fair terms license Patent. Another one is that he government could exercise March in rights.

>It costs a quarter to manufacture each pill but the manufacturers charge several dollars for that pill.

Is Trump writing checks to pay for R&D, salaries, etc? Of course they cost more than are to manufacture, that's the basics of business.

Unless we move to a heavily regulated single-payer system then these problems will continue. SP will negotiate with drug companies from a powerful position and be able to push down costs via policy. We keep seeing success with SP and socialized healthcare in Europe and elsewhere and somehow keep pretending the problem is too much regulation (?) or patents. Yet somehow Europe manages to thrive with those very same issues!

>We have evidence that the FDA errs too conservatively

The FDA has had public whistleblowers to stop dangerous drugs from getting approved. Its extremely arguable whether the FDA is either too conservative or too liberal or easily gamed by political pressure.

I don't believe Western Europe is any better in quality of drug vetting.

That's where the spending is concentrated, not in daily maintenance meds that cost a buck or two.

Giving pharmaceutical companies the full 20 years after approval, regardless of how long it took, would create a perverse incentive to patent early just to protect existing patent marketshare. It would also be extremely unfair to everyone else like the aviation/aerospace, semiconductor, and energy industries where it can easily take 5-10 years to get from patent to product and cost just as much. It's much better to subsidize research (which the public does on a massive scale already) and drive down the regulatory burden of approval, which we can do without decreasing safety by some targeted reforms of the FDA (mostly by giving it more power to organize clinical trial infrastructure and enforce transparency and trial integrity). Giving pharma more power is not the answer.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DevelopmentApprovalProcess/SmallBu...

> If it's safe enough for Western Europe, it's probably safe enough for Americans.

Tell that to all the thalidomide kids in Europe. That's probably the best example of where the FDA saved a lot of lives.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickcox/2016/12/14/trumps-fd...

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-12-07/trump...

I'd like to see evidence for that. My impression, from all that I've read on the subject, the truth is quite the opposite. The FDA's funding has steadily been cut over the years and the restrictions on drug trials have been more lax over time. For example, drug trials have famously small sample sizes and are completely run by the companies themselves.

https://www.pharmacist.com/article/trump-calls-fda-slow-and-...

Why Trump supporters think they can have the benefits of single-payer while attacking it and proposing a ridiculous healthcare bill is beyond me.

Americans subsidize drugs for the rest of the world.

Europe has 8 different competing companies that make epipens, but the US only has only approved 2. And the second one has to be specifically prescribed or you get the more expensive name brand. And the company that makes it apparently gives bribes to generic manufacturers to keep them from competing. And spends lots lobbying congress to let them keep doing this.

A decade or so ago there was a big push to import cheaper drugs from Canada. What did drug companies do? Put a cap on how much drug would be sold in Canada. Canadians ended up restricting exports so that they had enough drug for their own citizens.

Anyway, regardless, what if pharma was only slightly or moderately profitable instead of insanely profitable? I don't want to be snarky, but the "we're not doing it unless it makes us a very big bag of cash" model of business just seems counter to the idea that having access to good healthcare is a basic human right. This is what makes me want to just create a whole DARPA + universities + national labs sort of system that takes on a lot of that responsibility of developing and testing drugs that is driven by more than just profit.